For each client, Eved can incorporate the contract terms it negotiates
with suppliers, and companies can
set up approvals processes for suppliers requesting rush payments.

“Like a card, they’re paying one
invoice to Eved,” said Mashiach.
“We’re disbursing those funds
to suppliers, so it just simplifies
the whole process and solves the
problem for companies to have to
write and process so many invoices
through their standard AP system,”
she added. Unlike, say, a meetings card, Eved’s direct integration
with the corporation’s ERP system
“automates getting all the data from
invoices … automatically back into
their financial systems, which is huge
because today [many corporations]
key it in manually,” said Mashiach.

“You see only a total for the dollaramount, not the various quantitiesor types of items [purchased],” hesaid. Plus, “the level of data capturedis limited, based on how [the ven-dor] registered in the merchant cat-egories set up by the card providers,which may not correlate completelyto the goods and services purchased,”he offered.

With Dell’s input, Eved addressed
this issue by giving clients the ability
to onboard preferred vendors into a
marketplace and to categorize vendors based on the types of services
they deliver.

As the technology platform matured
to the point that it could manage spend
automatically, Dell was able to release
the marketing agency from that task,
giving the full contract to Eved. With
financial backing from external investors, Eved went solo the following year,
in 2015, but continues to service the
company that helped it gain its footing.

The Payoff

That’s good for Dell, which has
realized “double-digit percent savings” from slimming down to a
single spend-management partner,
reducing administration costs and
increasing productivity. It also reduced the costly need to expedite
payments to vendors.

Dell meetings administrators nowcreate business requirement docu-mentation within the Eved system,allowing the company to see at aglance an event’s status, the suppli-ers involved and their responsibilities.Oberts estimated the model savesadministrators as much as 20 percentof the time previously spent in theprocure-to-pay life cycle.“The system does a good job ofmaneuvering through the steps tonotify the next individual that it’s theirturn to act; that’s time saved,” saidOberts. “It also helps with the fiveWs—who, what, when, where andwhy—so the funds can be released atthe right time and the vendor knowswhen to start services based on hav-ing an approved purchase order, rath-er than just a verbal approval.”Cleaning up the procure-to-paycycle has improved Dell’s meetingsand events overall, according toOberts. “The new model allows theinternal team to be more valuablein terms of what they can deliver,be that the quality of the programsadministered or the reduced timein reconciling,” he said. “The dif-ference is an increase in programquality, as [planning] time is nowfocused on the overall experienceand messaging, rather than theadministrative tasks like contractsand invoices.”Moving away from its start-up status under Dell’s wing, Eveddiscovered that the technologygiant’s struggles were far from unique.“Dell’s issues were the same as For-tune 500 companies across the board,where they didn’t have visibility intomeetings and events spend and thepayment process was very painfulfor this particular category,” she said.Addressing that complexity up fronthas proved all the better for Eved, asit pushes its solution out of the nestand into the marketplace.

SNAPSHOT

Organization:Meetings program of multinational computer and technology
company Dell

Volume: Multimillion-dollar spend for meetings since implementing

Challenge:A typical enterprise resource planning system and a mixed bag
of payment processes—statements of work, purchase cards and manual
payments—accumulated hidden costs and lack of visibility.

Approach:Dell, event procurement platform Eved and a marketing agency already
working with Dell created an electronic data interchange to share information on
funds, specific events, purchase orders and more and integrate it with the ERP system.

Solution: Dell can input a specified budget for an event. Eved processes payments up to the amount specified and disburses the funds. Dell also can source
suppliers from the more than 5,000 in Eved’s system. Reduced administration
costs and time led to double-digit-percent savings, and Dell gained greater
visibility into its spend.